In the story he kidnaps and locks a girl in his house, but struggles with the morality of his baser urges that push him to abuse her. Ultimately, he manages to resist his psychosis and not rape or murder her, though she tragically dies of pneumonia anyway.

If you found yourself nodding quietly along with that previous statement, you're probably a serial killer. Because that's exactly what they got out of the story: Load's of them took inspiration from Clegg's actions, except that they actually did all the fucked up shit that he abstained from. Take Leonard Lake and Charles Ng, who have an estimated body count of 25. They dubbed their spree "Operation Miranda" after a character in Fowles's book, documenting their crimes in a series of videotapes and diaries. Christopher Wilder, another spree killer of women, had the book on him when he was shot by the FBI. Robert Bordella took inspiration from the film version of The Collector, killing six young men. But all the other serial killers laugh at him; the book-motivated murders were way better than the movie-motivated ones.

Why the Bullshit Interpretation is Exactly That

The Collector was intended as a cautionary tale about the divisions of class in our society, and the dangers of power becoming available to people who are too untrustworthy to handle it. It was in no way a glorification of kidnap or murder. In fact, Fredrick Clegg, the anti-hero of Fowles's novel, repeatedly disapproves of physically harming or sexually abusing his captive--only wanting to be loved by her. The killers who took inspiration from the novel are the exact kind of people which Fowles was warning of: Complete lunatics who abuse the power that they're allowed.

Which is pretty much to be expected of serial killers. You'd just figure that, of all the many things they insist tell them to kill--from Son of Sam's dog to John Wayne Gacy's catalogue of ICP albums--a book whose central message is "try not to kill people" wouldn't be that high up there.

#1. Lolita - Millions of Pedophiles

The Classic Book

Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita is the story of the unfortunately named Humbert Humbert, a middle-aged professor who's also basically a deranged pedophile. Humbert kidnaps a young girl, Lolita, and travels the country with her, until she runs off with another middle-aged man. Man, talk about jumping out of the pot-bellied frying pan and into the hair-plugged fire, right?

Japan--presumably struggling to outdo its long and storied tradition of mind-boggling lunacy--has a booming "lolicon" industry. That's a portmanteau of "Lolita complex" and, yes, it's porn. Obviously. It is Japan after all.

The term specifically refers to animated pornography that depicts children in an erotic context. Even more disturbing? The volume: Almost half of the animated porn released in Japan every year (which is like, all of it. They seriously love to hump cartoons in the Land of the Rising Sun) fits comfortably into the lolicon genre. Though the studies aren't exactly concrete, many do suggest that the prevalence of lolicon in Japan has reportedly led to significantly increased sex crime rates against children and teens.

Why the Bullshit Interpretation is Exactly That

The message of Lolita is hardly "pedophiles are awesome!"

In fact, it's pretty much the exact fucking opposite. Remember how everybody dies and all? We don't know how the translation was handled, but we're pretty sure the Japanese version didn't end with all the characters laughing and leaping into the air for an '80s sitcom style freeze-frame. Most of the interpretations of Nabokov's famous novel point to Humbert being a gigantic collection of dick-shaped blobs--a completely and utterly reprehensible human being that should by no means be emulated. Nabokov himself even hated the character, as evidenced by the fact that he wrote him as a goddamn pedophile.